Hi Kev,
I am somehow embarrased for what I found in the investigation phase:
I DELETED the file, rebooted the laptop and... the file did not appare
anymore!
I went to my other laptop and the phenomenon continued as described. I
noticed that it seems related to the PPP daemon.
Another particular that I noted is the timestamp. I noticed that at boot
time I find the following directories with a different timestamp but the
time seems subsequent to the begin of the startup:
/etc
/dev
/root
/var
/tmp
while root-n seems to have been touched/created just BEFORE THE END OF
THE SHUTDOWN PROCESS.
Few days ago I downloaded the kernel 2.4.22 and applied the patch ac4.
Since this laptop has a winmodem, today I recompiled (not without some
problems) the lt_modem. Magically, after having recompiled the lt_modem
and installed in the /etc/modules.conf, the file root-n stopped to
appear and the booting process did not show up the message regarding
CSLIP and PPP modules loading that seemed to be related with the file.
I have dumped the /proc/kcore and started to scan it looking for the
string root-n and, although the file root-n had not been created I found
the string "root-n.dat"
I was not able to find who belongs this tile to, but I can see that it
appears between some libraries and after samba
this is part of the dump of the content of the core (produced with
midnight commander)